A nice week off. Back to the figurative grind tomorrow. Sigh.At the Chebeague Island boatyard, I saw no less than two Ariels on their moorings. I didn't make it over to the boatyard until the last day, what was I thinking? Nonetheless, after a week off, it inspired me to get cracking. My wife was kind enough to take kid duty and let me get back to work on the boat on Saturday.
I started off scrubbing the side deck to get rid of any blush that may have formed on the surface of the epoxy - which I didn't see - which I wouldn't know what it looked like if I did see - so maybe I did see some. In any event, I scrubbed the deck. Nice and solid and hard. Yippee.
The plan was to wash the deck, grind things a bit to give the new epoxy a good surface to adhere to, and lay down the final layers of fiberglass tape. On closer inspection, I noticed a couple of the seams which I had previously filled with unthickened expoxy, now had air under the fiberglass tape! Can't be good. So I got out the mat knife and sliced away to get at the void, figuringI'd have to do the joint all over again. Then I went over all the epoxied surfaces with my sander and 60 grit. The epoxy sands a lot easier than the original gel coat - after the previous weekends of grinding, it was almost a pleasure. Heh!When I was done grinding, I filled the seams with thickened epoxy.
Then I got to looking at the holes where the forward most stanchion base was attached to the deck, right in front of my
forward most cut. Now why didn't I cut that section out? I know the core is bad there. Oh well. Shouldn't be to hard to fix. I thought I'd try the drill and bent nail bit. I broke the nail. I moved on to an allen wrench, which I broke. Then got a bigger allen wrench. So much wet core kept coming out that I decided to heck with piddling around like this, and got out my 1 inch hole saw drill bit thingy - whatever it's called. This way, I could really get in there a clean everything out, and then fill the holes with epoxy. No big deal since this whole section of deck will be faired, etc. - someday.
To make this way too long story short, I dug and scraped and gouged, taped the undersides of the holes and filled them. Then mixed more epoxy, laid down 2" tape or 4" tape where needed until my batch ran out, then did it again. I even got out the cloth, the thick mat stuff to fill in low areas where my grinding was at its best. I finished by dark - the whole side deck, everything. Whew!
